It Takes Two

04.29.14

Congressman Accuses Wife Of Bigamy

Florida Democrat Alan Grayson claimed Tuesday that his marriage of two decades was invalid because his wife hadn't yet divorced her previous husband.

Congress has featured a multitude of sinners recently. Accused fraudsters, adulterers and drug users have all gotten attention on Capitol Hill in the past few months. But Tuesday it turned out that one congressman may have ties to a far more exotic crime; bigamy.

Alan Grayson, the Democratic firebrand from Central Florida currently in the midst of a rather tumultous divorce, accused his wife Lolita of being a bigamist on Tuesday. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Grayson is accusing his wife of falsely claiming that she was divorced when they were married in 1990. Instead, Grayson alleges that she didn't divorce her prior husband, Robert Carson, until four years later. As a result, the Florida congressman is demanding that his marriage be annulled and that Lolita be forced to return all money and property that she has received as a result of the marriage.

The demand for annulment matters because Grayson is rich, even by Congress's high standards. If the marriage was invalid, Grayson does not have to pay out a dime in alimony as opposed to a divorce. The outspoken Florida congressman declined to comment to reporters about the bigamy accusations on Tuesday but, considering his messy divorce has already included an allegation of domestic abuse by Grayson's wife which the congressman had to refute with video showing that she was the aggressor, it's fair to say that there is more drama to come in this story.

Grayson is the second prominent Democrat in the past two centuries to be accused of being in a bigamous marriage. The first was Andrew Jackson, the 7th President of the United States, whose wife Rachel had yet to finalize her divorce from her first husband finalized before marrying Jackson in 1794.